This idea is actually a combination of two of my previous ideas - namely the FAH "Business Card/Promotional Postcard" idea combined with an annual "FAH Donor Recruiting Contest" award. My brother joined a national sales organization a few years ago. Each year this organization has a "Rookie of the Year" contest where the top rookie FSR (Field Service Representative) wins a fairly substantial cash award along with a number of prizes and other recognitions. I'm proud to say that my little brother won the ROY award a few years ago. So it occurs to me, why can't we have an annual "FAH New Donor Recruiting Award" (along with say a $100,000.00 prize) which would go to the member of the FAH community who recruits (and brings in) the most new donors to the FAH project during the calendar year?
To qualify for this prize, there must be certain conditions (and certain qualifications) that a new donor must meet before that "new donor" can be included in a contestants total. An obvious condition would be that in order to be counted, a new donor must have completed (and returned) some minimum number of Work Units during the year in which they are recruited. I'm not sure what such a number should be, but I'm thinking a minimum of 50 completed WUs would be required before a new donor could be added to a contestants total. (Fifty is an arbitrary number - others might feel that the new donor should complete a minimum of 100 WUs before they are credited to a recruiters total.) The goal of establishing a minimum number of completed WUs is to try and encourage new donors to continue folding as some may fold for a week, maybe do 25 or 30 WUs, and quit. The goal here is twofold: Not just to bring in new donors, but to (hopefully) keep new donors folding. There are other conditions (and "rules") for this contest that I haven't thought of, but I'm sure I can depend on all of you folks to point out the things I've missed. (The most obvious "problem" with this idea is: "OK Alan, who's going to put up the annual $100,000.00 prize for the winner of this contest? You!?" That's a good question ... I don't know the answer.)
Assuming we can solve the "big problem" of where to get that 100K prize money that makes this "contest" possible, one way a contestant might go about getting credit for recruiting a new donor would be having a special "code number" printed on your "FAH Business Card/Post Card" and asking your new donor prospect to enter that number when they are downloading the software and registering. (This would require a bit of coordination with Bruce and the Pande Group I suppose.) If we don't use some kind of "code number" scheme to tag new donors to their recruiter, I suppose each donor will have to get the name and email address of the individuals they recruit. The key here is that if you have a pre-printed FAH card, (such as what I have suggested here: viewtopic.php?f=86&t=23382), that will make your recruiting efforts a bit easier. (Heck, I've recruited several new donors via casual conversations at my local Barnes & Noble - without the benefit of a FAH Business Card - so it can't be that hard!)
Coming up with the money to fund the prize is the major problem with this idea, but a legitimate shot at a $100,000.00 prize is a lot of motivation. If we only have 100 dedicated (and creative) folks vying for such a prize, somebody will get a pretty good return on the investment of their time - and Dr. Pande and his team will be a lot closer to those 100,000 new folders that he would like to see. (And hopefully the team will be able to take simulation of the Alpha synuclein protein out of the "experimental project" catagory and get it on the front burner!) I would like to see Folding@Home go from the largest distributed computing project in the world to the largest distributed computing project in the universe. If we currently have a sustained performance rating in the neighborhood of 3-5 petaFLOPs, I want to see that rate increase by a factor of ten - at a minimum. Bring in enough new donors and we should be able to blow these numbers out of the water!
My brother won a nationwide "Rookie of the Year" contest and he was only up against 40-45 other FSRs. It appears to me that there are approximately ten (maybe twenty) folders who read and post to these forums. I wish I were wealthy as I would put up the $100K (and "suggest" some of the contest rules) myself. However, even if we can't secure a generous benefactor who would provide the seed money for this prize fund, maybe we can institute such a "contest" anyway - just for the hell of it. This is a challenge where you don't have to devise a "fair" way of comparing uniprocessor x86 FLOPs to quad-core processor FLOPs to GPU FLOPs - all you have to do to win this contest is get out there and hustle. Use your gift of gab and talk to people!
